SOURCE: Foodista, Inc.

 

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - May 5, 2009) - Foodista.com, the online cooking encyclopedia everyone can edit, announced today that it has completed a Series A financing led by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). The amount of Amazon's investment and the terms were not disclosed.

"In less than a year, Foodista has created an exciting new way for food lovers everywhere to share their culinary passion online," said Jorrit Van der Meulen, Amazon.com Vice President, Content Sites.

Launched in December, 2008, Foodista.com is a collaborative Web project focused on building the world's largest, highest quality cooking encyclopedia. With user contributions Foodista is creating a free resource to help millions of people learn how to cook everything and anything. The site features a structured wiki with linked information on foods, cooking techniques, kitchen tools, and recipes.

"We are thrilled to have Amazon.com as an investor, especially since they pioneered community-based content development on the Web," said Barnaby Dorfman, Foodista.com Founder and CEO. "Their investment will help us introduce more food lovers to Foodista in the months to come."

In addition to today's announcement about financing, Foodista has announced that Mr. Van der Meulen and Ms. Tracy Sarich, Executive Director of the Children's Trust Foundation, are joining the Foodista Board of Directors.

About Foodista

Foodista, Inc. is a Seattle company that operates http://www.foodista.com, the online cooking encyclopedia everyone can edit. The company leverages open source software, cloud computing resources, and wisdom of the crowds to rapidly develop cooking software and content. Foodista is the organizer of the International Food Blogger Conference (http://ifbc.foodista.com). Combined the founders have more than 20 years of Internet development experience and are all veterans of Amazon.com.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.amazon.cn.

As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.